In the United States, the trading of securities is closely regulated under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, 15 U.S.C. §§78a-78mm. The term “security” is defined in 15 U.S.C. §78c(a)(10) as “any note, stock, treasury stock, bond, debenture, certificate of interest or participation in any profit-sharing agreement or in any oil, gas, or other mineral royalty or lease, any collateral-trust certificate, preorganization certificate or subscription, transferable share, investment contract, voting-trust certificate, certificate of deposit, for a security, any put, call, straddle, option, or privilege on any security, certificate of deposit, or group or index of securities (including any interest therein or based on the value thereof), or any put, call, straddle, option, or privilege entered into on a national securities exchange relating to foreign currency, or in general, any instrument commonly known as a ‘security’; or any certificate of interest or participation in, temporary or interim certificate for, or warrant or right to subscribe to or purchase, any of the foregoing . . . but shall not include currency or any note draft, bill of exchange, or banker's acceptance which has a maturity at the time of issuance of not exceeding nine months, exclusive of days of grace, or any renewal thereof the maturity of which is likewise limited.” Stocks are specific instances of securities. Although the preferred embodiment is primarily concerned with computerized stock trading, it is fully applicable to trading of any securities.
Securities are conventionally traded on exchanges. As set forth in 15 U.S.C. §78c(a)(1), “the term ‘exchange’ means any organization, association, or group of persons, whether incorporated or unincorporated, which constitutes, maintains, or provides a market place or facilities for bringing together purchasers and sellers of securities or for otherwise performing with respect to securities the functions commonly performed by a stock exchange as that term is generally understood, and includes the market place and the market facilities maintained by such exchange”. Well known exchanges include, for example, the New York Stock Exchange, the American Stock Exchange and NASDAQ. Such known exchanges are referred to herein as national exchanges.
Usually securities are traded through brokers and dealers, which frequently use an on-line system to receive orders and facilitate trades. As set forth in 17 C.F.R. §240.17a-23(b)(2) a broker/dealer trading system is “any facility that provides a mechanism, automated in full or in part, for:
(i) Collecting, receiving, disseminating, or displaying system orders [i.e., orders to purchase or sell a security]; and
(ii) Matching, crossing, or executing system orders, or otherwise facilitating agreement to the basic terms of a purchase or sale of a security between system participants [i.e., the users of the trading system], or between a system participant and the system sponsor, through use of the system or through the system sponsor [i.e., the entity controlling the broker/dealer system].”
In this patent application, the terms “security”, “exchange” and “broker/dealer trading system”, are used as defined above.
Systems are known for trading securities over the Internet on the national exchanges at the prices quoted on those exchanges. These systems support trading during normal business hours of the national exchanges, which may not be convenient for many users, such as many individuals who would prefer to trade from home after the close of the exchanges. The existing systems, however, do not support active trading after the closing hours of the exchanges. Thus, there is a need for a system that permits the users to execute trades after normal market hours (after-hours trades) without using an established exchange. And, there is a need for a system that permits users to trade with each other (“user-to-user trading”) without involving an exchange.
The presently available systems are directed toward the presentation of numerically formatted information. Moreover, these systems do not provide a visualization of the status of securities as they are traded so as to enable users to gain an essentially immediate and accurate impression of a stock's status, direction of movement, and rate of change, without having to resort to complex mental calculations and holding such calculations in short-term memory. But humans are unsuited to processing numeric information quickly and accurately, and performing mental calculations under stressful conditions places very high cognitive workloads on humans. In addition to being poor processors of numeric information, humans also tend to have very weak short-term memories. Requiring users to perform mental calculations and then hold the results of those calculations in short-term memory while performing even more calculations is unnecessarily difficult and demanding, especially when users are placed under the additional stress of having to decide whether to buy, sell or hold a stock. Traditional on-line trading systems further compound the problem by requiring users to navigate from page to page within the site to gather news and information on their positions, their profit and loss, their open orders, their current positions, and their financial account information. Each time a user moves to a new screen he is forced to store values, which are critical to informed trade-decision-making, in short-term memory.
Another deficiency in current Internet trading systems is that users cannot obtain a real-time quotation on a particular stock (or a portfolio of stocks) without manually requesting a specific quotation from the trading system server, often by typing it every time they need a quote, or hitting “refresh.” That is, users of current Internet trading systems cannot simply access the trading system and receive a continuously updated display of real-time quotes for a particular stock or a portfolio of stocks. The need to type in a stock symbol every time a quote is desired further contributes to the inefficiency of the existing systems.
Accordingly, there is a need for an efficient Internet-based trading system which provides improved human interaction and after-hours trading.